The Rest of the Story

The rest of the story from Ruston: So Sunday's road race up in Ruston was on a short 5-mile loop that I remembered from some races a long time ago. What I remembered most was the final kilometer-long stair-step climb up to the finish line and the full minute I lost once when I blew up one year at the start of the sprint. The back side of the course featured a couple of significant climbs and one nice descent before the final turn leading up to the big climb. The route is so far out in the middle of nowhere that there's grass growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. The temperature forecast for the day was about the same as Saturday's, which called for highs in the low 100s. Fortunately, the Masters race was in the second wave, starting around 9 am, and the distance was short - about 30 miles. Of course, than meant six laps and six times up the hills in fairly rapid succession.

As the earlier Women's race was ending I pulled the bike down from the rooftop carrier, filled my bottles, and rolled down the road for a little warmup. When I looked down I was surprised to find my rear derailleur canted inward at a fairly dramatic angle, no doubt a result of the prior day's run-in with Dona's front wheel. It was bad enough that the derailleur was rubbing the spokes when it was on the 25, and I thought to myself how lucky I was that it hadn't snagged a spoke on the final climb the day before. I was so out of it at that point that I don't even remember what gear I was in. I assume I used the 25 but don't remember hearing anything hitting the spokes. I stopped and carefully bent it back into alignment, more or less, wondering how many times I'd get away with that before the aluminum derailleur hanger broke. I had a spare one in my bag, but since one of the tiny Allen bolts holding the old one onto the bike was mangled, replacing it would probably require power tools and another bolt. Anyway, I got it all working fine in plenty of time.

The Masters race was fairly animated with a number of breakaways by LaS'port and S3 riders that were, no doubt, designed to make Donald and me work. Since Donald was riding pretty defensively, I ended up chasing down a couple of them pretty much all by myself. My legs were feeling OK, but I knew I'd end up paying for the extra work I was doing. It might have been smarter, from an Omnium standpoint, to let one of the breaks go so that the 1st place points would get sucked up by someone who couldn't win the omnium, but I always have a hard time with that sort of thing. Halfway through the last lap someone attacked hard just after we'd been passed (once again - we passed each other a couple of times) by some of the Cat. 4 riders who were apparently having a much faster race than we. The pack didn't respond at all and for a little while I wondered if it had been a Cat. 4 rider. It wasn't. I decided I didn't want to race for second place, so I went to the front and pulled it back, finally making contact just before the start of the final climb, probably about a mile before the finish. Halfway up the hill Donald and Grant attacked up the left side and I was too slow to go with them, so I ended up finishing 3rd in the race and ultimately 3rd in the omnium. The last 200 meters were past the steepest part of the climb and it took forever to get to the finish line. Despite the heat and low Masters turnout, it was a fun race on some really challenging courses.

In the earlier Women's race Mignon and Ashley had finished 4th and 5th, which I think was a little disappointing, giving them 3rd and 4th in the overall omnium for the weekend. We hung around for a few laps of the Ca.t 1/2 race, but it was getting pretty hot and with a 5 hour drive ahead of us we left before the finish. On the way home I learned that Mike W had crashed pretty heavily during the Giro Ride - something about the traffic barricades down at the end of Hayne and the fact he was riding his track TT bike with, I assume, just a front brake.

This morning's levee ride got uncharacteristically fast for a Wednesday when Woody hit the front on his TT bike. A few miles earlier Scott had yelled to him that his saddle bag was starting to come loose, but apparently he hadn't heard it. I planned on reminding him about it, but once the pace picked up I forgot all about it. Someone pulled out of the paceline as the speed ramped up to 27 or 28 and I soon found myself on Woody's wheel searching for a draft. Suddenly I saw something fall and knew immediately what it was. His seat bag had fallen and wedged itself between the rear wheel and the frame, completely locking up his rear wheel. Woody went left. I went right and got by him as he skidded to a stop, burning completely through his rear tire and twisting or bending his front derailleur until the crankarm caught it. Somehow nobody went down. This all happened just as we were passing one of the ubiquitous police cars up there, so by the time I'd slowed down, turned around, and gotten back to him, Woody was already loading his bike into the officer's car to get a ride back to the parking lot. The pace got a lot slower after that!